That big American farms are better for workers is a new argument to me. It's compelling, and not implausible, but the article is both sweeping and lightly, anonymously sourced. The idea of a large farm offering a benefits package to its workers strikes me as surprising. Who is this agricultural HR administrator "whose job it is to handle staffing issues?" If "Manuel" can't use his real name, how likely is he to be eligible for any kind of employee benefits? As it stands, the article is less a piece of reporting than it is an editorial.

As editorial, this sort of fact-light praise of labor-friendly big agriculture is not new to me. It's the rhetoric of the failed Workers' Paradise of the Soviets.

Hi, Thanks for taking the time to comment. The sourcing is a little tricky because (a) Slate's style is typically to not do direct citations, as is standard in newspaper reporting and (b) the data about farm practices comes from the Farm Employers Labor Service, which only distributes its (proprietary) research in hard copy and cannot be linked to. But that's where I drew the farm practice information from. The point of the piece isn't to say that big farms are the answer to all our problems, but to point out the ways in which they are better-suited to provide good working conditions. It's true that if we had, say, public health insurance and a more robust social safety net, some of those advantages would disappear. But the nitty gritty work--like labor inspection--needs to be taken into account when we're thinking about how to remake American agriculture. As a comparative example, in New York City, the city shifted child care funding from public centers in favor of vouchers to be used at countless, tiny home-based day care centers, making comprehensive regulation and inspection is far more difficult under those circumstances, and there have been some problems with safety and quality of care. Does that mean all home-based care is bad? Of course not. But there's something to be said for building a system that takes oversight seriously. Thanks again for your thoughts, Tracie McMillan